


038 "Avengers"

by wheel_pen



Series: Iron Man AU [38]
Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Fish out of Water, My Pepper is different, Post-Iron Man, alternative universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-12
Updated: 2013-04-12
Packaged: 2017-12-08 07:32:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/758747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wheel_pen/pseuds/wheel_pen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony and Pepper discuss his new superhero teammates, the Avengers. And also who the synthetic construct was originally meant for—his father. “You’re making my tummy hurt with all these twisted ideas of yours today.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	038 "Avengers"

**Author's Note:**

> 1) My Pepper is very different from canon Pepper. Her personality/origin is very different; to separate her from canon Pepper I've given her a new last name and a different hair color.
> 
> 2) The bad words are censored. That's just how I do things.
> 
> 3) Stories are numbered in the order I wrote them, which isn't necessarily the order in which they occur. The timeline is Chapter 2 of story 031 “wet.”
> 
> I wrote this series after the first Iron Man movie came out. It's very AU but I hope you'll enjoy it anyway. I own nothing and appreciate the chance to play with these characters.
> 
> Note: This was written before the Avengers movie was publicized, so the Avengers info is based on the comic book universe, gleaned from the Internet. Probably Wikipedia.

            “…It’s up to you, New York, Neeeeeeeewwwwww Yoooooorrrrrrrkkkkkkkk!”

            “That was very nice, Tony.”

            “Thank you, Pepper.” I flopped back down on the bed—hard to inflate the chest cavity properly when you’re lying down—and continued watching Pepper pack for our trip to, you guessed it, New York City. Rhodey always said he hated packing for a trip, but I found it quite enjoyable. “Not those pants, I don’t like those pants.”

            Pepper set the neatly folded pair aside. “If you don’t like them, we should get rid of them,” she advised sensibly. Pepper was always so frickin’ _sensible_.

            “Oh, I dunno, they’re okay if I’m just going to be down in the shop, and you’re not home, and I’m not recording anything,” I replied ambiguously. “I just don’t want anyone to ever see me in them, or to see myself in them. They’re kind of baggy old-person jeans, don’t you think?”

            “Well, perhaps we should save them for when you’re a baggy old person,” she suggested, with a hint of a smile.

            “Pepper, have I told you how much I love this sense of humor you’ve developed?” I rhapsodized. “It’s actually _so_ much more fun to be laughing _with_ you rather than _at_ you. Well,” I amended, “maybe not _so_ much more fun, but _more_ fun at least.” I rolled over on my back to look at her upside-down. Yep, still hot.

            She paused her packing of my socks thoughtfully. “I believe having sex with you has helped develop my sense of humor.”

            My smile vanished and I rolled back over. “What? Pepper, _that’s_ not funny.”

            She looked at me quizzically. “I meant, because the increased level of energy it provides me has allowed me to improve my social development more rapidly.” Ohhhh. “What did you think I meant?”

            I squirmed a little on the bed, picking at a stray thread on the comforter. I should really know better, especially by now, than to assume Pepper meant things the way other women might. “Oh, well, that’s _almost_ what I thought you—“ I looked up just in time to see her little smirk, realized I’d been had, and started chuckling in spite of myself. “I think your social development is improving a little _too_ much,” I decided, winging a pillow at her head.

            She caught it easily and set it on the floor, where it was immediately grabbed by a robot who rushed it back to the bed like there was a fire to put out. “Will you continue singing?” Pepper inquired, examining a stack of t-shirts for inclusion.

            “Oh no,” I replied in an obnoxious tone. “I mean, I was _gonna_ do ‘I Guess the Lord Must Live in New York City’ or whatever it is, but not if you’re going to make fun of me. I have a very fragile ego, you know.”

            “So I’ve noticed.”

            “Pack all the t-shirts with offensive sayings on them,” I instructed after a minute. “Did you get my ‘Also Available in Sober’ shirt? How about the one that says, ‘With a shirt this awesome, who needs pants’? Don’t forget the ‘Sleek yet obnoxious’ one. And, ‘The police never think it’s as funny as you do.’ Boy, is _that_ the truth. Oh! And hey, where’s my ‘Taliban bomb technician’ t-shirt?” I asked. “I’ve been looking for that for, like, two weeks.”

            “I don’t like that shirt,” Pepper reminded me.

            I grinned. “I know.” Normally even _I_ might have passed on such a shirt in the name of good taste (though, let’s face it, just barely), but since I really _had_ been a Taliban bomb technician for many years, indirectly anyway, I felt it was okay for me to make fun of it. Kind of like how Pepper was allowed to tell blond jokes (or as I called it, stories of everyday life), or how Rhodey could drop the N-bomb (not that he _would_ , but still). “It’s cathartic,” I tried to explain to Pepper. “Besides which, I gotta say it before anyone _else_ does.”

            “Wouldn’t you rather wear your nice ‘Genius by birth, slacker by choice’ t-shirt?” she tempted, holding it up.

            “No.” I shook my head. “See, that one’s not really funny, because it’s obviously true. Now where’s my terrorist t-shirt?” I insisted.

            Pepper gave me a sour look and retrieved the requested shirt from where she’d no doubt hidden it in the closet. “Why do you want me to pack all these ridiculous shirts, anyway?” she asked.

            I knew she was just sore because she didn’t usually get the jokes on them. ‘Save a horse, ride a cowboy’ had taken a really long time to explain properly, for instance. But let no one say I wasn’t a thorough teacher. No student left behind in _my_ class.

            “I want to wear them when we work out,” I informed her. “To lighten the mood. Superheroes can be so pretentious and uptight, don’t you think?” She merely raised an eyebrow and began packing my underwear. “I mean—take this Thor dude. Please!” I waited to see if Pepper would get my joke, or even acknowledge it. She didn’t. I continued anyway. “I mean, what’s up with this guy? ‘Paralyzed medical students turned Viking gods, on the next Oprah!’”

            “He _does_ have a magic hammer,” Pepper pointed out, which didn’t exactly endear her to me.

            “Magic hammer, my a-s,” I judged boldly. “Magic is just science we don’t understand yet.”

            “Like Rice Crispies,” Pepper agreed.

            “Er, yeah. Anyway, that whole ‘I am a god’ thing is just a _little_ looney tunes.” Inspiration struck. “In fact, he kind of _does_ look like Bugs Bunny in drag, don’t you think? I mean, I bet that flowing Fabio hair is actually a wig. ‘I can’t believe it’s not’—“ Pepper sat down on the edge of the bed and gave me a long, lingering kiss. “See, that’s all I wanted,” I assured her when we broke apart. “A little attention, that’s all.”

            “This reminds me, I need to pack your toothbrush,” she responded, heading off to the bathroom.

            “Very subtle, Pepper,” I called after her, not moving from the bed. “Hey, what about that Captain America? Have you ever met a guy with a bigger red-white-and-blue stick shoved up his a-s? Or ‘Ant-Man’—what the h—l? He can shrink to the size of an ant. Dude, if that happened to me I sure wouldn’t brag about it.”

            “Well, his girlfriend shrinks, too, doesn’t she?” Pepper asked, walking back out of the bathroom with a bag of toiletries. “ _And_ she can grow wings! That’s exciting.”

            “’Tragedy strikes first annual Avengers summer picnic: Two teammates mistaken for insect pests, squashed with flyswatter,’” I predicted solemnly.

            “Well, it was very nice of you to let them have your house in New York,” Pepper assured me.

            “Yeah, well, I wasn’t using it,” I decided. I mean, the thing took up a whole city block and had three basement levels perfect for mad scientist labs, cybernetic workshops, portals to other dimensions, and whatever else advanced superhero teams required. Also a bowling alley. And since technically I had donated the house to the non-profit named after my mom, which also funded the Avengers, I got to take a _massive_ tax write-off. “Which was really the plan from the beginning,” I explained to Pepper.

            “You’re very clever,” she agreed pleasantly.

            “Now that Bruce guy is pretty cool,” I added, just so she wouldn’t think I was really down on my teammates, my posse, my bros. Well, the Wasp was a woman, actually. “And if I ever want to remodel the place I’ll just insult his mother and watch the walls come tumbling down.”

            “He turns _green_ ,” she reminded me. This was not a good point, in her opinion. “Do you think he can photosynthesize?”

            “I don’t know, Pep,” I replied. “I’ll definitely have to not ask him that sometime.”

            She gave me a look, then flipped the suitcase shut and zipped it thoroughly. “There, you’re all packed and ready for tomorrow.”

            “ _You’re_ gonna pack now, right?” I asked eagerly. “If you’re looking for suggestions, I would go with _edible_.”

            “Socks?” she asked innocently.

            “Ew!”

            She smirked at me. “I packed last night. I’m all done.”

            “Last night?” I asked in confusion. “When? Was it before or after we discovered it was a bad idea to microwave whipped cream?” And that, unfortunately, was not a euphemism. Although any further description of the evening would involve them.

            “After,” Pepper specified, hauling my suitcase to a location that _seemed_ out of the way, but was actually strategically located to trip me at least three times. “You were already asleep.”

            I made a noise of frustration and rolled over on the bed. “Pepper, you know I don’t like it when you get up and do stuff after I’m asleep,” I said with a bit of a pout.

            She sat down beside me and vainly attempted to push my hair back into place. “It gets a little dull just lying there all night,” she reminded me evenly. “Considering that I don’t actually _sleep_.”

            I pulled her closer. “Couldn’t you maybe _try_ sleeping?” I suggested, and not for the first time. “If you could just put in a couple hours every night, then you wouldn’t have to go away on vacation to sleep.” To be honest I was dreading Pepper’s annual vacation this year, even though it was still months away. Well, I dreaded it every year—except for last year when I was so obsessed with building the suit that it barely registered with me, which is obsessed indeed—but now more than ever, since I knew so much more about her and we had become A Couple.

            “It doesn’t seem to work that way,” she reminded me, tolerantly and a little bit sadly. Well, I felt better knowing that Pepper would miss me, too, when the time came. Except, really, she would be in a coma for a week, so when she woke up it would feel like almost no time had passed, while I would be a disorganized wreck who’d eaten nothing but peanut butter and Mountain Dew for days.

            “Don’t take this personally, but that seems like a design flaw,” I commented delicately. “I mean, wouldn’t you be more likely to miss protecting me from something if you were gone for a whole week solid, rather than if you were just asleep for a flexible two-hour block out of every twenty-four?”

            “Well maybe Pepper 2.0 will have that feature,” she suggested, quirking a bit of a smile.

            Since we were on this topic… “Hmm, well, so, you were really young when they put you in the construct and sent you to this dimension,” I checked, and she nodded. “Which I know you said was supposed to be an advantage, being young and adaptable and all.” She nodded again as I tried to keep my tone light. That whole part still kind of irritated me. “But, er, didn’t you guys think maybe someone older, who had had a lot of time to study our culture, might have been a better choice?” I had been thinking this over and the story just didn’t make sense to me. I mean, if you wanted to explore the Amazon rainforest and get in good with the native tribes, you didn’t grab some eight-year-old kid and toss her into their midst, even if she _did_ kind of look like them. You sent in some middle-aged white dude who’d been studying the region from a university in Kansas for the past twenty years. Maybe he had a harder time fitting in physically, but he had more practical knowledge and way more ability to handle himself in tricky situations, like discovering he’d accidentally drunk from the sacred Dolphin God’s gourd and now had to face stoning to prove his immortality—

            Pepper frowned. “I’m starting to lose your caravan of thought. Airplane. Train.”

            “Good recovery,” I complimented. “And it’s okay, I have to think a second to remember what my point is. Oh yeah—older researcher type who’d been studying Earth for centuries. Didn’t any of _them_ want to go?”

            “You would rather have the equivalent of a ‘middle-aged white dude’ inhabiting this construct?” Pepper teased.

            I made a face that I felt appropriately reflected my response to that idea. “Little kinky for me, Pep,” I assured her. I gave her an expectant look after a moment, indicating I wasn’t going to just let the question slide.

            “Well, _actually_ ,” she began, leaning back against some part of me that wasn’t currently in use, “the construct sent to this dimension was originally supposed to be a man.”

            My reaction was predictably bug-eyed with horror and dismay. “A _man_?! Are you _kidding_ me?! What the h—l! You were gonna be a _man_?! That’s not _right_.”

            “Well, it wasn’t going to be _me_ in it,” she shrugged heartlessly. “It was going to be someone who had been studying Earth’s cultures for a long time, and who had personality characteristics that were appropriate for an American male. We have three resonance types, you know—“

            “I remember, I remember,” I assured her. Three genders instead of two, basically, with one of each needed to provide the proper balance of random subatomic particles to create a new being, aka sexual reproduction. Swingin’. She had explained all that to me before, not that I had really caught most of the details. Electronics, computer science, engineering, aerodynamics—those I understood. Particle physics would’ve taken more reading. Now trust me, I would’ve done it to understand Pepper and her tribe better, but books speculating on the nature of intelligent beings in other dimensions aren’t exactly readily available on Amazon. At least outside the Fiction section. “That would have been a _serious_ tactical error,” I continued, after I had recovered a bit. “There is no way in h—l I would have listened to a _man_. I’ve never even hired a man as my assistant! Well, I tried that one guy for a couple weeks, but it was too weird for me and I got rid of him.”

            “The male construct wasn’t meant for you,” Pepper revealed, watching my face carefully. “He was meant for your father.”

            There was a long moment of silence. “Oh,” I finally responded. “Yeah, well, that was a good idea, then,” I agreed. “My dad would never have let a female assistant spend as much time with him.”

            Pepper rested her arm on my side, her fingers skittering under the edge of my shirt to brush against my ribs. “The project had been planned for a long time,” she told me evenly. “Since before you were born, in fact. It took many years to gather enough data and figure out how to create a synthetic construct that seemed authentic. And then the accident changed everything.”

            “Yeah.” Wasn’t that the truth. I rolled onto my back and took Pepper with me. “So you had to switch gears completely?”

            “It wouldn’t have been ready for another few years anyway,” she went on. “They were able to refit the basic design as a female instead.”

            I grinned. “You are definitely the best refit I’ve ever seen.”

            “Thank you,” she allowed. “Unfortunately there was not a suitable candidate among the scholars of Earth culture to inhabit the construct, so I was chosen.”

            I frowned as I ran my hand up and down her arm idly. “They didn’t have any women Earth scholars? Er, feminine-equivalent resonance type?”

            She shrugged. “Some didn’t have the right personality to deal with _you_ ,” she replied, as if this was some kind of difficult task only a few individuals in the universe could perform. “Some could have dealt with you, but didn’t have the right personality for a young American woman.”

            “I’d settle for a young European woman,” I quipped. “French, Italian… I hear Luxembourgers are pretty d—n sexy.”

            “It was more like… Imagine _my_ body—“

            “Done.”

            “—with Mrs.—“

            “Wait, I’m still imagining your body.”

            She gave me a look. “My body, with the personality of Mrs. Salyers.”

            I imagined this. The results were disturbing. Mary Salyers had been one of my secretaries for many years, almost since I first became CEO (after they realized that giving me young, pretty secretaries resulted in nothing getting done around my office—work-wise, that is). I always found Mary very pleasant. But, yeah, she was like my grandma or something. I tried to picture Pepper decorating her desk with ceramic puppies she could dress for the holidays, or wearing baggy old-person jeans and a sweater with sparkles on it, or tsking me when I staggered in hungover and offering me some Ensure for breakfast. Actually the last one was somewhat plausible, since the smell of the fake-milk beverage usually sent me racing for the bathroom to throw up, and I could see Pepper thinking that a just punishment. Later-years Pepper, that is, once she realized that not all humans consumed the vast quantities of alcohol that I did, and for very good reasons.

            “Tony?” Pepper said quietly. “Are you still imagining, or did you fall asleep with your eyes open again?”

            “I only do that in Board meetings,” I assured her, bringing myself back to the present. “You with Mary’s personality would have been weird. Not _very_ weird, but weird.”

            “Would you say we would have been unlikely to end up in a sexual relationship?” she teased.

            “You’re making my tummy hurt with all these twisted ideas of yours today,” I complained.

            “Poor Tony,” she cooed, much to my satisfaction. “Would you like some club soda?”

            “Not right now,” I decided. “But you should repeat the offer in that same tone every… seven minutes.” There was a pause. “So go on with your story, Pepper,” I prompted. “Some were too old and some had major character flaws that would have made me loathe them, I believe you were saying. But there wasn’t _anyone_ else? Not one who was, like, a legal adult?” Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t wish for someone other than Pepper acting as, er, Pepper. I just thought it was s‑‑‑‑y how she got dumped on Earth as a little kid with hardly any training in how to be a human. I kept hoping she would give me a decent reason why that particular decision had been made.

            “Well,” she answered slowly, as though she knew I wouldn’t like her response, “no one who was suitable, and _wanted_ to do it. Since it meant leaving our community for good.”

            I tightened my grip on Pepper. I didn’t like that part of the story, either. “You guys could’ve spent another year working on a return mailing system,” I commented stiffly. “That would’ve been okay.”

            She smiled at me. “It would’ve taken _ten_ years, or twenty,” she corrected. “Your lives go by so much faster than ours.”

            “Well, I’m glad you came, anyway,” I finally said after a long moment.

            “Me too.” She lay there with me for another minute, then pushed herself up. “Well, I have to finish getting things ready for the trip.”

            “Did you pack a bikini? The house has a hot tub,” I reminded her. “Did you pack me a selection of flattering and skimpy Speedos? Do you want me to sing ‘Tangerine Speedo’?”

            “No, yes, and no,” Pepper replied efficiently, bustling around the room. “Jarvis, is the suit packed and ready to go? The emergency repairs kit? The first aid kit? Have you transmitted Mr. Stark’s medical records to the official on-site physician?”

            “Whoo-hoo,” I exclaimed from the bed. “First Annual Avengers Training Camp, here we come!”

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> All of Tony's t-shirts are real.


End file.
